How CMO Jessica Powell Is Introducing Social Networking Start-Up Badoo To The U.S.

UK-based social networking site Badoo.com is launching a new marketing campaign in New York this week in which they invite 1,000 New Yorkers to participate in a mammoth photo shoot to capture the ultimate profile picture. Forbes spoke to Jessica Powell, the chief marketing officer of Badoo, to learn more about the start-up, her marketing initiatives, and the purpose of The Badoo Project.

What’s Badoo.com?

Badoo is the world’s largest social network for meeting new people. It first launched in 2006, and we now have around 140 million registered users worldwide and more than 125,000 new users signing up every day. Monthly, we have more than 35 million active users. Badoo is new to the U.S., but we already have six million registered users and are growing really fast, especially on mobile. While Badoo is a social networking site—it’s very different from a traditional social network .

How is it different than other big social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn?

Badoo puts the “social” back into social networking. It is all about meeting new people. People use the site for making new friends, chatting, flirting, and dating, and all our features and tools are geared toward bringing people together for new social experiences.So in that sense, we actually provide a different, yet complementary experience from traditional social networking sites.

If you think about it, you might use Facebook for connecting with people you already know and LinkedIn for making professional connections, but you’d use Badoo for something different, which is making new personal connections and expanding your social circle. When you look at it that way, there’s a lot of room for growth, as savvy consumers start to segment their online activities and networks for different purposes in their life.

So do you even consider Facebook a competitor since your site is so different?

No, we don’t view Facebook as a competitor. Wonderfully for us, we view them as very separate. Badoo’s all about meeting new people in the real world. In fact, 50% of the conversations on our site end in an offline meet-up. So we’re the first step for people wanting to connect. More than half of our users add people as Facebook friends after meeting them on Badoo, so in that way, we’re a nice complement to the social networking ecosystem, as well as being a popular site in our own right.

Tell me about your marketing strategy. How do you recruit new users? And how to you distinguish yourself from the other big social networking sites in your marketing campaigns?

We’re focused on continually refining the product and on growing our user base, so my marketing priorities stem from those goals. To date, we’ve benefited from viral and word-of-mouth organic growth. The core of our site is free--we’re a freemium product--and it’s very effective at bringing people together, so it works really well, and because of that, people want to share it with their friends.

We also saw that works really well in terms of our international growth. Badoo started in Spain, and our users spread from there geographically, first to Southern Europe and Latin America, and now, we’re seeing rapid growth across Eastern Europe and markets like the U.S. and U.K.

Now, however, we’re at a stage in our company growth where certain more formal marketing strategies start to make sense for our international footprint. That’s how we’ve come to the launch of The Badoo Project, which is our first U.S. campaign.

Jessica Powell, CMO of Badoo.com

What does your role as CMO of a social networking start-up entail?

I’m in a wonderful position as CMO, and it’s a rather unique, rare position, in that I don’t spend much time at all looking at revenue. Instead, I’m focused on building the company and building a better product.

Like at any rapidly growing start-up, I wear many hats in my role as CMO. I oversee our global business development, marketing and PR functions and analytics dept, as well as developing and implementing strategy around Badoo’s international roll-out. That’s a massive focus right now. I also have my hands pretty deep in our product-development strategy, as the user experience is paramount and central to everything we do at Badoo.

Explain The Badoo Project, launching tomorrow.

To mark Badoo’s official U.S. launch, we’re holding a massive three-day photo shoot in New York to give people the ultimate online profile picture. We wanted to find a fun way to let New Yorkers know what Badoo Is all about, and to celebrate the city’s swagger in our new ad campaign. We’re calling it The Badoo Project.

Over three days, March 22 to March 24, four of America's hottest fashion photographers, Kenneth Cappello, Dan Martensen, Brooke Nipar and Danielle Levitt, have the ambitious task of capturing the portraits of 1,000 New Yorkers, which will be gifted to everyone at the shoot. They can use them to glam up their Badoo.com and other social network profile pages. We’ve seen some bad profile pictures over the years, and we all know how important it is to make a good first impression.

Based on personality, energy and individuality, a final 24 will then get the chance to say hello to the city they love, by starring in a mixed media campaign, including billboards, banners and other media, across New York throughout the month of May. Judges will choose 22 finalists, and the final two will be crowned “People’s Choice” winners, voted for by the public with Facebook “likes.”

We also want people to have fun and socialize at the shoot, especially because Badoo is all about making new friends and chatting. With 1,000 New Yorkers all together in one place, we hope that people come away with new friendships and new stories to tell.

Why did you choose to hold the event in New York?

New York is an amazingly diverse city and has an energy all its own. New Yorkers are ultra sociable and that’s what Badoo users represent, so it seemed like the perfect fit for our first U.S. campaign.

What are you hoping to accomplish with this project?

We’ve had great growth in the U.S. so far, with over 6 million people registered. Badoo is at its best when you get a lot of people in one area online together--then it becomes a really vibrant, social place with everyone interacting. We thought it would be a great experiment to introduce ourselves to the U.S., and specifically New York City, and introduce people to each other, and then see what happens.

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